About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

28 Prison J. 361 (1948)

handle is hein.journals/prsjrnl28 and id is 1 raw text is: 




  ONE HUNDRED SIXTY-FIRST ANNUAL REPORT
                              OF
        THE   PENNSYLVANIA PRISON SOCIETY
        And  I doubt not through the ages
        And  increasing purpose runs
        And  the minds of men are broadened
        With the process of the suns
    As  I have studied the history of the Prison Society covering
one hundred  and  sixty-one years of its existance, I have been
impressed with its singleness of purpose. That purpose has been
to serve the individual prisouer in such a way as will be most
helpful to him in re-establishing himself as a member of a demo-
cratic society. As the years have come and gone, the focus of in-
terest has been consistently on that purpose. The  Society was
instrumental in establishing the old Eastern State Penitentiary
with its separate and solitary confinement almost a century and
a half ago. In advocating that system, they saw with rare insight
for their time, that imprisonment in itself would not effect reform
and  they proposed  a system of  lay visiting whereby members
of the Society were authorized by law  to visit with the men in
their cells. This was a serious undertaking but they knew that
change  in men's lives is wrought through a purposeful relation-
ship with others. The preamble to the Constitution of the Society,
adopted  in 1787, puts it this way: The link which should bind
the whole  family of mankind  together under all circumstances,
be preserved unbroken;  and  such degree and  modes  of punish-
ment  may  be' discovered and suggested as may, instead of con-
tinuing habits of vice, become the means of restoring our fellow-
creatures to virtue and happiness. No one can doubt their belief
in the inherent capacity of the individual to achieve a fuller life,
and I think there is no doubt that they understood also that the
new  democratic society which was being established at that time,
would  continue to operate successfully only if individual mem-
bers of that society would join with their fellows in an effort to
achieve that end.
    For  more than  one hundred  years, the Society achieved its
purposes wholly through  the activities of volunteers. When that
method  began  to prove  unsatisfactory and professional social
work  developed as a better way  to meet the needs of a highly
industrialized civilization, the Society, after careful study and
deliberation, introduced a, casework program in 1925. That action
seemed  to some members  of the Society at the time to be a be-
trayal of its original purpose, but subsequent history has proven
quite the contrary, for in taking this decisive step, the Society
pioneered in applying casework  as a, method of dealing with a..
dult offenders. By reason of this pioneering, the Society has been
privileged to share its experience with a number of other Prison-
                             361

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

profiles profiles most